“The National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine (UA PBC) is declining to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest 2019,” the broadcaster said in a statement on Wednesday.

It said the national selection process had revealed a “systemic problem” in that artists in the Ukrainian music industry have business links to an “aggressor state”.

Russia and Ukraine are culturally close but political ties between the countries have been in dire straits since Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014. A conflict between Ukrainian troops and breakaway Moscow-backed rebels in the east of Ukraine has claimed about 13,000 lives since it broke out following the annexation.

National broadcaster UA PBC earlier accused Maruv, whose real name is Anna Korsun, of failing to understand her role as an ambassador who should represent Ukrainian public opinion.

“I’m a musician, not a tool in the political arena,” Korsun wrote on Instagram.

UA PBC made public some of the contract terms it requires the country’s performer to sign, including a ban on “statements that may call into question the issue of territorial integrity and security of Ukraine”. It also stipulated that the artist must not tour in Russia for three months after the contest.

“This is a crisis to which there is no definite or correct answer because society is divided,” Oleksandra Koltsova, a member of the board that oversees the Eurovision entry, told Hromadske national television.

Neither Freedom Jazz, the vocal trio who finished second in the heat, nor Kazka and Brunettes Shoot Blondes – the bands that came third and fourth – will go to Tel Aviv.

“We do not need a victory at any cost, our mission is to unite people with our music, not to sow discord,” Kazka wrote on its Facebook page after talks with the broadcaster.

The latest debacle comes after Kiev, when it hosted the competition in 2017, refused to let Russia’s entry cross its border because she had performed in Moscow-annexed Crimea. The previous year Ukraine infuriated Russia with its own entry – a ballad about the Soviet deportation of Crimea’s indigenous Tatar population under Joseph Stalin.

The song competition, which dates back to the 1950s, is typically hosted each May by the previous year’s winner.